Korea's Diverse Religious Revolution

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

Given the recent Winter Olympics in South Korea, and the tense relationship between North Korea and the United States, Canadians know quite a bit about Koreans, who together number almost 77 million people on the divided peninsula.

But when it comes to their religious life, that’s another matter. However, a number of faculty and students at the University of Prince Edward Island now are aware of a bit more, after attending a lecture on March 8 by Don Baker, a professor of Korean Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

A renowned scholar of east Asian history, especially Korea’s religious, intellectual and cultural history, in his lecture “From the Mountains into the Cities: The Transformation of Korean Buddhism in the Twentieth Century,” he outlined the transformation of Buddhism in modern Korea under the influence of Japan, changing Korean values, Christianity, and Western ideas.

Mahayana Buddhism, one of the three main strands of the faith, arrived on the Korean peninsula more than 1,600 years ago.

Roman Catholicism appeared in the late 18^th century, and Protestant missionaries came a century later. Both were often persecuted by the Choson dynasty, a religiously Confucian monarchy, which ruled the country after 1392. Even Buddhism was marginalized.

Korea came under Japanese imperial control in 1910 and Japan occupied the country until defeat in the Second World War 35 years later.

While Korean Christians spearheaded the anti-imperialist movement, Buddhist monks were more inclined to collaborate with Tokyo’s governors. 

Japanese Buddhists had demanded the right to proselytize in the cities, lifting the five-hundred year ban on monks and nuns entering cities enforced after 1392, also benefitting Korean Buddhists.

With the division of the peninsula along the 38^th parallel into the Communist north and non-Communist south in 1945, more than one million Christians, strongly anti-Communist, which had lived above the line, moved south.

South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, who ruled until 1960, was a Methodist. Christmas became a national holiday.

More educated and urban than the Buddhists, Christian Koreans founded universities, newspapers and electronic media, and hospitals. Today 88 per cent of South Koreans live in cities.

There are twice as many Christians as Buddhists in Seoul, the South Korean capital and the country’s largest city. 

Christians were in the forefront of the democratization movements of the 1980s that opposed the military regimes of the time, especially the massive 1987 demonstrations that deposed General Chun Doo-hwan and led to free elections and civilian governments.

By then, Buddhists monks, traditionally less willing to confront authority, had also become involved.

In order to catch up to the Christians, Buddhists have created their own universities, radio and television stations, and hospitals, and are now more involved in civil society.

According to the national census conducted in 2015, 19.7 per cent of the population are Protestants, 15.5 per cent are Buddhists, and 7.9 per cent belong to the Roman Catholic Church; in total Christianity is the religion of 27.6 per cent of the Korean population. 

Professor Baker thinks the census probably undercounted the more rural Buddhist population.

Of the Protestant denominations, the largest are the Presbyterian churches. In North America, he also noted, 80 per cent of Koreans are Christians. 

A majority of South Koreans, 56.9 per cent, have no formal membership in a religious organisation.

Communist North Korea does recognize a few small “official” Buddhist, Catholic and Protestant groups, and allows them their houses of worship, but it’s mainly in order to show the world they allow freedom of religion; the Buddhist temples also serve as tourist sites.

South Korea’s current president, Moon Jae-in, elected last May, is a Roman Catholic. He has pledged to solve the North Korean crisis by diplomatic means.